WASHINGTON – One day after President Bush announced a limited drawdown of U.S. troops from Iraq by next summer, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said yesterday that it might be possible to reduce U.S. forces there further, to about 100,000 troops by the end of 2008.
CHARLES DHARAPAK / Associated Press
President Bush had lunch with troops at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Va., before speaking with reporters and calling for Democrats and others to abandon their opposition to his Iraq policy, saying, "Now's the chance for us to come together as a nation."
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Gates' comments followed a White House report yesterday concluding that the Iraqi government has not made satisfactory progress on several political and security benchmarks. In a congressionally mandated assessment, the administration found only modest improvements since an interim report in July.
In a prime-time Thursday night speech, Bush endorsed the recommendation of Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, to remove 5,700 Marines and soldiers by Christmas and five additional combat brigades by summer, reducing the troop level to between 130,000 and 140,000.
Petraeus told Congress this week that he would not recommend further cuts until March.
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Highlights
White House report: Iraqi government has made progress on eight of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks.
GAO report: Progress has been made on only three benchmarks.
Defense secretary's hope: Reduce U.S. forces in Iraq to about 100,000 troops by the end of 2008.
Administration projection: Troop level between 130,000 and 140,000 by June.
Democrats' reaction: Administration is just staying the course.
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Yesterday, Gates said he hopes that in March, Petraeus “will be able to say that he thinks that the pace of drawdowns can continue at the same rate in the second half of the year as in the first half of the year.” Asked if such reductions would mean that U.S. troops would number about 100,000 by the end of 2008, Gates replied, “That would be the math.”
Gates spokesman Geoff Morrell later emphasized that the defense secretary's comments were his “personal views” and did not represent administration policy or a formal military plan.
But Gates' statements, delivered in his first Washington news conference in two months, underscored the continuing battle inside the administration and on Capitol Hill over the size of the U.S. troop presence in Iraq. Leading Democrats said yesterday that Bush's proposed cuts do not go far enough in reshaping the U.S. mission.
After judging two months ago that the Iraqi government had made satisfactory progress on eight of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks, the White House yesterday noted “satisfactory progress” on one more objective, emphasizing a recent agreement among Iraq's senior political leaders to proceed with a plan allowing former Baathists to return to civic life. The report did not note that the lack of a quorum in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Cabinet – being boycotted by 15 of 37 ministers – has prevented further consideration of the measure.
Bush and other officials had once described the 18 benchmarks as critical to judging conditions in Iraq. But as it became clear that the Iraqis would miss many of the goals, the White House has increasingly sought to redefine progress, pointing to local political reconciliation in places such as Anbar province as a more telling sign that the Iraqis can eventually build a functioning state.
The 28-page White House report made it clear that the administration does not want to revisit the benchmarks issue, saying only that officials will offer a more general assessment of conditions in Iraq in March.
The administration's critics seized on the report as evidence that Bush had continued to misrepresent the situation in Iraq, painting a rosier than warranted picture to fend off demands from congressional Democrats and some Republicans for a more drastic change in strategy.
“Day after day, the American people see and hear evidence that the president's policy is failing despite incessant cheerleading by administration officials,” Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the House majority leader, said in a statement. “It is no wonder that the administration's credibility is in tatters and the president largely looked to his top general to sell his stay-the-course strategy.”
Bush, speaking briefly in Quantico, Va., after having lunch with Marines, did not answer a reporter's question about the benchmarks. Instead, the president issued another plea for Democrats and others to abandon their opposition to his Iraq policy.
“Now's the chance for us to come together as a nation,” he said. “Some of us who believe security was paramount were on opposite sides of the debate, where people said we just simply need to bring our troops home. Well, now we've got security in the right direction, and we are bringing our troops home.”
Vice President Dick Cheney also took to the road to promote the administration's war strategy and, in an appearance at the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich., seemed to belittle the importance of benchmarks.
“President Bush will make his decisions based on the national interest and nothing else – not by artificial measures, not by political calculations, certainly not by poll numbers,” Cheney said.
Petraeus told The Washington Post on Thursday that he hopes to reach “sustainable security” in Iraq by June 2009, but he did not provide an estimate of how large a U.S. force would remain involved in backing up Iraqi forces then.
Gates' comments may fill in that blank to a degree; they could also foster expectations for Petraeus to recommend further cuts in six months.
The 100,000 troops figure also may indicate what kind of military presence the Bush administration intends to hand off to the next president, and also what the mission of that “post-surge” force might be.
“I think the mission of that group, when you get to the final steady state, it probably looks a lot like Baker-Hamilton,” Gates said, referring to the recommendations issued in December by the Iraq Study Group, which was led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind.
Gates, who was a member of that group until Bush nominated him to replace Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, noted that the major missions of such a force would include attacking terrorist groups, training and supporting Iraqi security forces, and helping patrol Iraq's borders to deter foreign intervention.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said there is little daylight among Gates, Bush and Petraeus. “I see a man who is secretary of defense expressing what his hope would be,” she said. “Everything he said was heavily conditional.”
In an interview last night on PBS's “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” Gates elaborated on his views and took issue with the assertion by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, that Bush is planning a 10-year occupation of Iraq.
“The reality is that what we're looking at is a conditions-based drawdown to a long-term presence that would be a stabilizing force in Iraq and in the region,” Gates said. “It would be a fraction of the force that we have there right now.”
By the end of the Bush presidency, Gates said, he hopes to see “a significantly smaller American presence in Iraq, that we would perhaps be somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 brigades instead of the 20 that we have right now, and that the situation was continuing to improve in a way that allowed that to happen.”
The administration's benchmark assessment yesterday contrasted with a report released last week by the Government Accountability Office, which judged that only three of the 18 benchmarks had been met.
Among the most significant conclusions of a draft of the GAO report was that the number of Iraqi army units capable of operating without U.S. military assistance had fallen from 10 to six. The numbers, which the U.S. military said were classified, were removed from the published version of the GAO report.
